Unautomating teaching with Summerhill English Schools

Following my own advice for automated teachers, I’ve been trying to use my search for something to write about Japan and or teaching English on my blog as a way of expanding my horizons rather than shrinking them. Recent semi-successful attempts include:

I’ve been dipping back into Eastern Standard Time, which was my bible to accessible Japanese culture when I first arrived in Japan (more serious guides to ikebana and what have you might have put me off for life) . Eastern Standard Time is a guide to Asian influence on American culture that has taught me just as much about America as it has about Japan and the rest of Asia, but anyway is highly recommended and is a great way of making sure that the things you learn about Japan are things you can actually talk about and interest people with when you go back home- a difficult task, believe me…

I’ve also just started Culture Matters, a debunking of Guns, Germs and Steel that is considerably more difficult to read but a bit more relevant to those living abroad and wanting to understand and talk about what they see around them and compare to other places. More about this soon now that I’ve remember that I’m reading it.

In exactly the same way, I can’t remember how Orientalism by Edward W.Said made it back from my bedside into my bookshelves, but will have to start reading again soon and let you know if it’s worth struggling through or not.

So, finally to a book I have actually finished recently- “Summerhill School- A New View of Childhood” by A.S.Neill.  A.S.Neill was one of the most famous proponents of free schools- at Summerhill students don’t have to come to lessons and can decide on most of the school rules in school meetings three times a week, where every student has an equal vote with every member of staff. Despite the fact that he supported the child raising theories of Dr (not Mr) Spock (something that Dr Spock himself later said he didn’t if I remember correctly) and had some very odd friends, from his book Neill (as all the staff and students called him) seems to be a genuinely undogmatic and questioning guy who was just trying to do the best for the kids he taught on a day to day basis, and who came up with what seemed to be radical ways of teaching at the time just because he had seen everything else he had tried fail- a genuinely humble approach that is as rare in education as it is in every other field.

The fact that he developed his theories in very particular circumstances means that you have to be very careful when trying to generalise that as principles for education at all, let alone taking it into entirely different fields and using Summerhill as support for changing EFL- but here are some thoughts of how A.S.Neill might have done the TEFL thing anyway:

Neill believed that what went on in classroom is actually secondary, so that, for example, using up to date teaching methods is going to have less impact on how students turn out than how they feel about themselves, their school and their family.

This has certainly come to light in a couple of schools I’ve worked in, where putting students in host families on council estates in South East London or telling them they could improve their English by studying other subjects and then giving them most of their lectures in Japanese sapped my students of all their motivation and left me with the job like that of an end of the season coach of a team that was already going down. As a humble classroom teacher, that is not a lot you can do about that. One thing is to slip in speaking tasks where they can make their feelings about these things clear (one IELTS example of this on the Worksheets page). You could also make sure your school includes non teaching matters such as warmth of the classroom or food in the cafeteria on any teaching feedback sheets. The best reaction, though, is just to change schools and let the old school know you left because what your students think about the school has lead you not to believe in what they are doing. I’ll be making that point clearly (again) to my boss about one of the places I get sent to shortly with exactly that idea in mind.

Neill believed that there comes a time when students are too conditioned by the education system they have been in to benefit from switching to a freer system.

As much as you might believe in the phonemic chart, peer correction, free speaking without error correction or classes that are mainly pairwork as methods of language learning, if you have students or a whole class that respond to them with confusion on what they are being asked to do, resentment at using a method they don’t believe in or simply dropping out of the class, you will need to rethink whether sticking to the methods they know might be the best short term method of improving their language skills. This can depend partly on how long they are likely to be studying English and what their final goal is- if the old methods they are used to will stop them progressing to a much better level in the long term and that matters to them, the battle might be worth it. Otherwise, possibly better for you to adapt to them.

Neill believed there was some students (in his case, bullies) who were sufficiently disruptive of the system that they just had to be removed from it.

As most schools we are in do not have the luxury of being able to throw people out (although my school in Spain did have a secret blackmark system for students who pissed the other students off so that the receptionist could tell them all the classes for next year were already full and we’d get back to them), if there is one student who somehow messes up the class for everyone else they will need to be dealt with in a totally different way to everyone else, but often (unfortunately) in the same room. For example, in a typically mixed-level Business English class in Japan (in Japan, there is nothing the teacher and students cannot overcome with “gambaru” effort, it appears) we recently had the additional problem of the lowest level student also protesting that he only needed to read English, not speak it. He basically now gets separate reading lessons with help from the teacher while the other students are doing pairwork and groupwork. A similar approach could be used with the long winded older guy who typically disrupts a lunchtime lesson of gossipy Japanese ladies with a speech on a news story he read last week. Start each class with a group and pairwork game on guessing the other person’s weekend, pair him up with yourself, and let him drone onto you while the others catch up on how their families are doing.

Neill noticed that there was an time somewhere between 10 and 12 where even students who had been taking an interest in classes would suddenly drop out of studying, especially amongst boys.

I haven’t particularly found this in my time in Japan, but the fact that kids weren’t allowed to run around and get it out of their system at that age might explain the continuously dropping motivation from then on. One technique I’ve come up with that might be relevant is that with 13 year old students and above the fastest way of losing their confidence is treating them like kids (even when it is a game that adults will happily play), so I start dry and introduce more fun and active stuff little by little. With 12s and unders, the fastest way of losing them is being boring, so we start with the same games as 6 year olds and get more bookish and ambitious once they start looking forward to English class. Please bear in mind, though, that the maturity of different nationalities, genders, classes and individual students might vary considerably.

Neill believed that the reason why some adults could never grow up is that they had not had enough time to play when they were younger.

This certainly seems to be backed up by the fact that Japanese kids don’t really get a childhood nowadays and then grow up to be people who can’t see that being a dolphin trainer is something that is cute as an answer to “What do you want to be when you grow up?” but is laughable in half a class of 22 year olds. There is not much I can do about that in an hour a week, but the fact that I’ve been determined to keep up ball games and target practice in the classroom despite some awful hand eye coordination might mean I’ve been trying to do my bit on this one. Basically, the only way we can respond to this is by using loads of games, both with the kids who need to get it out of their system and the adults who never did, and with younger kids make sure the language comes out of playing the game rather than the other way round. As for my own kids, I’ll be making sure they go to Tumble Tots instead of language lessons.

Neill believed that letting students get play out of their system meant that they could easily catch up with people who started studying earlier once they got motivated to do so.

I’ve seen this plenty of times in the one term catch up courses that our school runs. Children of various ages (up to a three-year age difference) who have never studied English before do a term of intensive English as a way of being able to join a class of kids their own age who have been studying English for several years in the following term. Not only do the older kids almost always progress quicker than the younger ones, mainly due to understanding what a foreign language is and why they need it, but they also quickly catch up with the students who have been studying longer once they join their class. Again, the focus with younger learners should be on learning the language through the games, moving onto teaching them grammar rules and reading and writing as they show an interest- due to intellectual curiosity or because they realise it will give them some help in winning games. In my experience, the very few students who never get to the point of asking you to explain something language related and then reacting positively when you do so are the same students who are never going to learn however you teach them.

Neill believed that children are messed up by their parents and if they are basically left to it they will turn themselves into happy, healthy adults who will be a positive asset to their countries (in their own way).

Though I am trying my best to keep an open mind here, this is quite plainly just wrong. He didn’t have the benefit of knowing how much of mental illness, alcoholism etc. etc. is genetic. He also lived in a society where the worst habits children could get themselves in and have to try and give up later were cigarettes rather than crack. If we did have an English school based on these lessons, we’d have policies like children being able to speak as much of their own language as they like until they feel like learning English, pairwork games that the teacher leaves lying around the room and explains to kids if they feel like doing them (a pairwork self-study class?) etc. etc. It seems quite clear that this will work for some kids (and adults) and not others- partly based on their upbringing and past education, but partly based on the genetic and more or less permanent parts of their personality. Still, if anyone did get these ideas to work they’d be guaranteed a starring place on Humanising Language Teaching.

That’s me about brainstormed out. When I was reading the book I found the whole thing a bit uninspiring, to be honest, but have surprised myself that it was in fact stirring some braincells. Very readable, anyway, and a nice bit of educational history, and maybe for some a nice bit of educational stimulation.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 2nd, 2007 at 11:28 amand is filed under Alternative teaching techniques, Books about teaching, Classroom dynamics, Classroom management, Discipline in the classroom, Humanistic language teaching, Learner training, Mixed ability classes, Pairwork and groupwork, Problem students, TEFL, TESOL, Teaching methods and methodologies, Teaching mixed level classes, Teaching teenagers, Teaching young learners, links. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.